


Being the Unspoken Words of Abigail Williams

by Iktsuarpok_Hiraeth



Category: The Crucible - Miller
Genre: Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), F/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Religion, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21730450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iktsuarpok_Hiraeth/pseuds/Iktsuarpok_Hiraeth
Summary: No question can be allowed concerning the faith and duty of the judge.---Inside the mind of Abigail Williams, the judge and jury herself.
Relationships: John Proctor/Abigail Williams
Kudos: 5





	Being the Unspoken Words of Abigail Williams

**Author's Note:**

> This is absolutely ancient writing that I'm finally adding here; writing that I'll likely add to in the future. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

I was in church when I knew I was one of the Select, one of the Chosen few.

The church where our preacher led his flock always appeared a tad lopsided, as though squinting, trying to perceive exactly what was going on so deep in its belly. I never felt like the church was holy in its gap-toothed stance.  
Not as holy as the how trees musky rainy scent always felt, or as holy as the moment precisely before dawn when the stars began to flicker out like the silver and copper shining of a trout’s scales before it dives.

But today was different. In the taste of the air, the clammy touch of impending fever on my brow, the world outside the church windows shimmering like flecks and dabs of paint straying across a canvas, too bright and chemical to be believable.

And then, clarity.

I knew all of a sudden that I had been chosen in God’s supreme machine to serve a role so majestic as to be utterly inconceivable.  
It was a revelation like emerging from the shadowy depths of the earth’s womb to be cut by the sun for the first time, like seeing all of the universe yield and unfurl itself before me in its splendor and vast multitude. The small crooked church with its whitewashed walls fell away in sudden revelation, in a sudden realization of power and control.

Blossoming, twisting, evolving, as delicate as the still wet wigs of a Monarch fresh out of the chrysalis, with twice the blood. Falling out of the prison I had no knowledge of, spinning in the fresh air.

Oh brave new World!

What secrets you hold out for me in plain sight!

I had been toddling around blind for so long, so far, but now was the time for action,

for running streams and white hot sunlight,

for long legs stretching out in the sun,

for hands reaching up for God and finding something even better.

\--

I killed my parents as they slept the next day.

\--

I remember my mother.

She was beautiful, and it was easy to see why Father said he loved her.  
When she smiled her tired eyes gained a cotton-soft glow to them, brought the shine back to tired eyes sunken deep in her face. Greying yellow candy-floss hair. 

Sometimes I almost start to miss her in the autumn, when the air begins to leach the green from the leaves to bring out their colorful truth.  
During days like that she would bring me with her to gather berries in the forest and fields to bake into a pie afterwards. We would walk under a soft flurry of gold and bronze from the trees. The leaves would land on our hats and cloaks and crunch into a mosaic under our feet. 

When I was still young enough for such pursuits I would race between the tree trunks to catch the falling leaves before they hit the ground, for Mother had told me that they were good luck. Sacred. They were pure like angels, having never touched the ground. She told me to make a wish on each one we caught, a wish as vulnerable as they were. I loathed allowing those angels to drop to the ground once the wishes had been made, I never liked being complicit in their defilement. 

I remember Mother’s warmth when she embraced me, I remember seeing soften eggshell give way and crack.

Perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Maybe she was like the autumn weather she loved so much, unable to fight the winter or turn back the sun, no matter how many leaves she snatched from the wind. 

Father was like winter, all blizzards and ice, bending leaves and bark from the trees’ soft, warm epicenter and to leave crushed flowers under frosted boots.  
I learned very quickly that Mother would not interfere with Father for all the autumn afternoons in the world spent making pie with me. One look from Father was enough to steal the safety of her arms and the love from her heart. He would blind her eyes and deafen her ears to me.  
My mother was a coward.

—-

I remember my father. 

He was as unpredictable and as mutable as the land he tended to. We only moved to where we were, so far from friends and family, because he loved the land.  
It was the silence that entrapped his attention.

Silence was sacred in his kingdom. My mother and I complied as best we could but in my father’s greatest moments of temper some mischievous spirit would lean down and whisper in his ear until we were screamed at for speaking words we had not uttered, hateful sentences we would never have dreamed of letting tumble out of our mouths. In those times he would turn from a man into something else. Something with no name, something twisted of face and voice, ears straining to hear God’s soft voice, something that terrified and enraged him. 

In retrospect he was like a fighting dog I had seen once. A frothing, hateful mountain of a cur lashing out with steel trap jaws in blind terror. But such actions are excusable in dogs. Men are of God’s image, with the temperance to withstand such sweet fruits like pleasure or wrath.

Sometimes my father journeyed into the woods in an attempt to outrun whatever demon plagued him. The demon that so greatly enjoyed wrapping its talons around such pliable material as mortal flesh. 

I followed him on one of his daily walks once, just to see what he did on those long days when he was away, to understand what strange odyssey he embarked on when no human eyes followed him. 

It was my first time in the deep forest.

He mostly walked in deep contemplation, like he was wading through knee deep mud, slow and ponderously. Sometimes he would mutter something, words being snapped up by the passing birds or blurred by the falling leaves. They were sliced into so many bits and pieces in this interference until they made no sense to my ears. He sometimes talked like this at home too, muttering something to whatever or whoever his eyes perceived that we did not see or hear ourselves. 

Now, in the refuge of the forest, he could be seen to weep, asking questions that I could not understand. Then in other moments he would sit upon a withered stump of a tree or saw toothed grass in perfect stillness and quiet that a passerby would have believed him dead.

When I returned home, I kept quiet about what I had seen.  
I had not gone unnoticed though and when he returned my father came through the open door like a hurricane, like a man with all the fires of Hell in his eyes. Shaking me by the shoulders he hissed of the pointy reckonings he would bring should I follow him, disobey him again. He whispered to me of a sunrise stained with blood, or damnation unto neither Heaven not Hell, that I would wish I’d never seen the sun go down. 

I disobeyed him the next day. I never did it again after that. 

—-

John Proctor was never supposed to happen, but he did, and I would not take back my actions, our actions, for anything in the world.  
He held all the richness and hidden complexities of a perfectly aged glass of wine, deep red and purple congealing like blood on the rim of an amber glass. There was something else about him, an otherness I could not place. Something as smooth as chestnuts, illuminating like embers, the color of rattlesnake venom on creamy cotton skin. 

My uncle Paris was the one who wanted me to work for John and his wife in the first place. He only wanted me out from under his feet, told me that some work would straighten me out, that Proctor would show me where I stood.  
In the end he most certainly did. 

His wife Elizabeth never liked me. She was loath to allow me into her home like the broken, ill creature that she was. 

He, John Proctor, would drag the cork from his favorite bottle of liquor at night when the work was done With no comfort from a miserable wife, times getting hard, and that damn fox of a pastor in town with his talks of gold and Hell pestering him. The sharp edged whiskey would bleed into the air, the scent guzzled into his clothes that had been softened by hard work and bleached by the sun. It made him grow claws on his tongue, made it grow fat and clumsy. 

I was a lamb on thin legs and I wrestled with a stallion. He loved me and I loved him for it.  
He needed me, needed us, together and complete. Like marrow in bones, like fire in the stars. 

—-

Elizabeth Proctor has hands of coal. She stains what she touches. Reaching, grabbing, pulling, holding.  
Her mouth is sticky black tar, words vomited up to take away what was mine and mine alone. While she lay in bed and did nothing, I was there when John needed me. When he needed a set of ears to listen, needed a woman. I was there when his heart lay gaping. I filled what was missing, something fresh and young and beautiful. 

When he looked at Elizabeth, I wanted to kill her.  
How dare she take what is mine? 

—-

I remember Tituba.

She was a vision of tough skin. Coffee bean eyes wrapped in sun damaged folds. She was someone that had been delicate before being swept away to our home, to our wasteland in the snow. She had been born into the warmth of a heavenly place, filled with baby soft sands and an ocean so blue that the sky would envy it. 

This place is cold cold cold. The trees are filled with needles that whisper their sweet scent out to the snowy forest, their touch poking, stabbing, scratching the skin. 

I remember the ritual in the forest.

The air is horribly soft and silky, with all the smoothness of snakeskin. Fire rushes past our eyes, chattering with the tangled woods around us. With the new moon overhead, with the moss under our feet. The sky bends, the ground bucks up, the two reach to meet one another. Lights spark blue and black beneath trembling eyelids, soft boiled eggs spilling out of bony eye sockets.  
There is nothing left in this place, a harshly forgiving place of rolled back eyes, shards of colored glass beneath the unfirtle dirt we walk on. 

We (I) wander (explore) this (that) Paradise (Hell) out (near) of (by) grasp (home). 

We (I) shake (break), shiver (crack), roll (scream), with (consumed) our (by) pleasure (agony). 

We (I) beg (grasp), plead (howl) for (against) our (my) cure (curse).

This is my deliverance, my end. This is my awakening, my beginning.

—-

God said, “Let there be light”  
and there was light.  
God saw the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness, calling the light Day and the darkness Night.  
The light was a cold untouchable brightness, while the darkness was as thick and sweet as treacle or chocolate warmed in ones palm. The two stayed as separate as a lump of warmed wax, rolling about in water. Malleable, yet distinct. 

Night was and is the more approachable of the twins. She embraced me with open arms. However, it was the sunrise that gave me the most hope. Sunrise was a promise that there would be change, that one day was down and another was nipping at my heels to steer me in the right direction. 

—-

The Church is a spider web of tripwire and paper strands, fragile and insidious.

I have laid down such razor sharp strings and pulleys with each word I speak within these walls. Every tiny shift is multiplieds a thousand times over, every breath a hurricane, every twitch is a hacksaw on bone, every word is gospel. 

I am a hydra, with so many biting snake heads waving and hissing. They drawl out echoes of my thoughts. I have surpassed mere wretched existence, now a living conglomerate of toothed words and thickened tongues. I am the words in everyone’s mouths, juggled under the heart and breastbone. 

Elizabeth, wife of my love, stands clear and bright as brass. She is nails and pliers, walls and snapping guard dogs between John and I. She is hard as diamonds and dark as coal. I can feel her spirits skin on mine, pulling hair and pinching limbs in my dreams at night. Her eyes are like gimlets and her gaze is needles and pins in my soft flesh. Flesh that John will be there to hold, to love, to care for, to kiss away the fear and pain. He will push away the abject tyranny and hopelessness. My savior, my king, my lover. 

Oh, my John.  
You seem to hate me when I see you in our Church’s courts despite how I am simply there to perform God’s work. I can feel the heat of your eyes, the weight of them like hot pokers on my skin. 

Why, John?  
I don’t understand why you treat me this way. You love me, you are my heartbeat and the breath in my lungs, you are my sun and my star filled night sky. 

Everything I do is for you.  
There is so much out there, John. I can see it out in the horizon, in the words spelled out by the stars overhead. It is so close, right there and maddeningly intangible. 

There is a current running through my blood, screaming of witches and death coming to us on the wings of the sunrise. There is something dead here, something limp and splintering, features pliable and filthy in the sparks and rolling of the fire. 

I have never been so sure of the existence of the Devil in Salem.


End file.
